P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

On 'The Simpsons,' I will say that we definitely like to comment on what's going on in the world, and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it, then we've gone part of the way of accomplishing our task.

I tend to think that there is a sophistication to everything at 'Saturday Night Live,' including the sketches.

There's always a message in my comedy.

Being a comedy writer gives you permission to be an outsider and poke fun at what people think about other people.

On the comedy side of what I love as a filmmaker are Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and Eddie Murphy; those are my favorites.

I used to love comic books, and I love American comedy, and neither are afraid to tackle big themes.

I love the satire and skewering of comedy writing.

I'm a 'Saturday Night Live' guy. I'm a comedy guy. As long as they're giving it to everyone, I don't care about how low they go, most of the time.

Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.

You start out with Mad magazine, and you go right through the sort of black humor of Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, Mort Sahl, Paul Krassner... If you put Lenny together with Mad magazine and run it through the brain of a college student, you get National Lampoon.

I tell the truth and I don't try to sugarcoat things. But I also decided that if you don't use humor or satire, then it's just too dark all the time. And one of my favorite literary works is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. As you know, that was an enormously famous satire piece that was able to point out, you know, things to people in a different way. And I do believe that satire and humor can reveal truth in a way that sometimes doesn't get revealed through other means. And so I decided to, every now and then, use satire and humor as well.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

Cartooning is preaching. And I think we have a right to do some preaching. I hate shallow humor. I hate shallow religious humor, I hate shallow sports humor, I hate shallowness of any kind.

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

Comedy is very strange to me and I don't fully understand it's purpose or function.

Donald Trump announced that he is not running for president. He would rather spend his time making Gary Busey sell Snapple on the street.

The only way to get a serious message across is through comedy

[Comedy] is an escape from illusions. The audience is...thinking, 'This bullshit we see and hear all day makes no sense.'

Most satirists are indeed a public scourge; Their mildest physic is a farrier's purge; Their acrid temper turns, as soon as stirr'd, The milk of their good purpose all to curd. Their zeal begotten, as their works rehearse, By lean despair upon an empty purse.

For me, it's important to elevate the hypocrisy with humor. Then you really are using the humor to elevate the problem, saying this is why it matters, and then saying we can combine the work together with laughing and being around joyful people and helping out. So the comedy sometimes can actually full-on expose the issue, but also it's a gathering tool. It serves a lot of purposes.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Donald Trump is not running for president. This is devastating news for Trump's supporters - all of whom are late night comedians.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

But you do have to learn, if you want to be a satirist, you can't be part of the party. Meaning, you can't go horseback riding with Jackie O in Central Park if you're going to make a joke about her that night.

Round-heads and Wooden-shoes are standing jokes.